


The Can't-Slumber Party

by kayliemalinza



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Aromantic, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Insomnia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-16
Updated: 2013-09-16
Packaged: 2017-12-26 19:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/969479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raleigh doesn't have insomnia anymore, but Mako does. Even unconscious, he wants to be there for her.</p><p>Teaser: Mako answers the door with damp-wavy hair and a pair of needle-nose pliers hooked over her thumb.</p><p> "Got some free floor space?" Raleigh grins, hefts the rolled-up mattress under his arm. "I get to sleep, and you get some company."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Can't-Slumber Party

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Phrenotobe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phrenotobe/gifts).



> Tumblr user phrenotobe prompted me for: "Pale Mako and Raleigh talking about their preferences wrt intimacy?"

Mako's staff sweeps easily over his rear, hooks under his knees, and he folds up at her feet. His staff rolls a few inches across the mat and stops. Raleigh leans forward a few inches and rests, cheek and temple and right ear brushing against her hip.

 "Are you tired?" Mako asks, because it's half past one in the morning and she's the one with insomnia, not him. Things have changed since they closed the Breach.

 "No," says Raleigh. The space behind his eyelids is syrupy, sweet and thick, warmly colored. His blood pulses like radar blips. He can see in the dark: Mako's ankles by his knees, calves on either side of him like perimeter posts, one hand bracing her staff against the mat. The other hand hovers over his shoulder.

 "You should go to bed," says Mako.

 He rubs his nose against the corner of her trouser pocket. "Okay."

 

* * *

 

They walk back to their quarters together and he pauses with his hatch halfway open. "Are you sure you're okay? I understand if you don't want to be alone right now."

 Mako dips her head in a bow, smiles. "I will be okay. Thank you. You need your rest." How polite.

 Raleigh dips his head in return, and their hatches clang shut at the same time.

 

* * *

 

Raleigh scrubs until the water stops dripping down his neck, then tosses the towel over the chair back. He stares at his bunk: standard issue mattress, scratchy blanket, thin pillow, as beautiful and inviting as summer rain.

 He grabs the foot of it and rolls up the whole shebang.

 

* * *

 

Mako answers the door with damp-wavy hair and a pair of needle-nose pliers hooked over her thumb.

 "Got some free floor space?" Raleigh grins, hefts the rolled-up mattress under his arm. "I get to sleep, and you get some company."

 Her smile mirrors his smile the way the inside of a spoon mirrors things: smaller, darker, weird at the corners. It's there, though.

 Raleigh sets the mattress down on the strip of floor between Mako's bed and her work table. It flops open of its own accord, blanket still tacked to the sheets like Velcro. The pillow stays crumpled up, petulant. That'll work. Raleigh crawls in, stretches out, smothers his yawn in his shoulder.

 "Will this bother you?" Mako asks, clacking the pliers open and shut. She's sitting on her stool, stretching so he can see her from the nose up. The work table blocks the rest of her face and her torso but he can see beneath it: dented struts, an inventory number stencilled on with orange spray paint, her blue striped pajama pants, her blue-veined feet perched on the bottom rung. There's a crate full of junk. Electrical innards.

 "Nah, I'm fine," Raleigh says. "I shared a room growing up, and, well, for most of my adult life, too. I can tune that stuff out." Yancy used to play with his train set, smug about his hour-later bedtime. Then he stayed up doing homework. Then he watched combat footage on mute and his dog tags clanked every time he rolled over. "Did you ever share a room?" Raleigh asks. "Growing up?"

 Something tiny and metal--a screw, probably--goes rolling across the table. All he can see is the top of her head now, scraggly-parted and soft from her shower. He wonders what she's building. "No. I always had my own room."

 "Didn't that get lonely?" Raleigh slides his right foot beneath his left leg to warm up the toes.

 The pliers thunk when Mako sets them down. "No," she says. Her legs swivel and one of the boxes in her metal caddy rattles open. "I saw people in the daytime. That was enough."

 Raleigh hums in response. Smacks his lips. Waits.

 "It was a little lonely sometimes," Mako admits.

 Raleigh has an idea of those sometimes, the shape and weight of them, the hollows they left behind: varying, coarse or smooth, like couch-leg pockmarks in the carpet or the bow of an old chair seat. Or like the sinkholes in Sitka, where old plumbing got pulled out and new girders never went in. 

 "I'm gonna help out with that from now on," he says.

 Mako grunts at that, deep from her throat, and it sounds so much like Pentecost that Raleigh feels the secondhand sorrow of it. Her toes curl around the rung of the stool. "I thought you were going to sleep," she says.

 "S'a slumber party," Raleigh mumbles. "No-one actually sleeps at a slumber party." But then he closes his eyes, because his timing has never been that great.

 

* * *

 

It's dark, something rustles, and his shin hurts.

 "Sorry!" Mako whispers. She's a green-edged lump, spectral in glow from some diode or hologram display or alarm clock. Raleigh's hand is wrapped around one of her legs, reaching out to steady her before he even woke up.

 "S'ok," Raleigh says, because she's climbing into bed and that's good. "Going to sleep?"

 "I'm going to try," she says, slithering the blankets around her. Raleigh's palm is hot where her calf was.

 "Good night, then," he says, and: "I love you." It just slips out.

 Mako flips her pillow over and plops her head down on it like a punch.

 "Is that okay?" Raleigh asks, because his previous words are hovering in the darkness, weird and fat.

 "What?" She's facing him, her cheek a green swoosh, her eyes glinting with pixels. 

 "That I love you."

 The cheek-swoosh changes shape, curves more tightly. Another spoon smile. "Of course," she says, and reaches down to squeeze his foot through the dumb scratchy blanket. 


End file.
